Section: Jewish Telegraphic Agency (USA)

MONTREAL (JTA) — A 93-year-old ex-Nazi stripped of his Canadian citizenship for an unprecedented fourth time is vowing to appeal the decision yet again. Last week, Canada revoked the citizenship of Helmut Oberlander, a retired developer in Waterloo, Ontario, who has been accused of hiding his Nazi past before obtaining citizenship in 1960. The...

(JTA) — Eight years after his release from wrongful imprisonment in Russia, the Israeli billionaire Mikhael Mirilashvili was elected to lead the World Jewish Congress Euro-Asian affiliate, representing communities from Ukraine to Singapore. Mirilashvili, who had spent eight years in a Russian prison until 2009 on trumped up charges connected to...

JERUSALEM (JTA) — An Israeli blogger who also holds Russian and Ukrainian citizenship was sentenced to three years in prison in Azerbaijan for illegally entering Nagorno-Karabakh, which is disputed territory with Armenia. Alexander Lapshin, 40, of Haifa, writes a Russian-language travel blog called Life Adventures that chronicles his trips to 122...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, with Hungarian President Janos Ader in Budapest, July 18, 2017. (Haim Zach/Israeli Government Press Office) (JTA) — To critics of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s visit to Hungary this week was a disgrace and an abandonment of local Jews in their fight against a government...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, and his Hungarian counterpart, Viktor Orban, at a joint news conference at the parliament in Budapest, July 18, 2017. (Karoly Arvai/AFP/Getty Images) (JTA) — Hungary committed a “sin” in not protecting its Jewish citizens during World War II and collaborating with the Nazis, the country’s...

WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — The prosecutor’s office in the western Poland city of Wroclaw issued an indictment against former priest Jacek Międlar for “public incitement to hatred based on religious and national differences.” He could face up to 2 years in prison. On Nov. 11, 2016, during the Polish Independence Day, Wroclaw hosted the “March of...

(JTA) — Unidentified individuals hurled a firebomb at a synagogue in Lviv and, in a separate incident, wrote anti-Semitic slogans on another Jewish community building in the western Ukrainian city. The incident involving a firebomb occurred on June 30 but was discovered only Monday, according to the Strana news site. The perpetrators may have...

(JTA) — Police in Crimea, a territory that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, are investigating the desecration by robbers of a mass grave of Holocaust victims near the city of Simferopol. The investigation opened Tuesday following the unauthorized exhumations performed last week at the site of a firing trench, where Nazis and their...

(JTA) — Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein addressed the Russian parliament more than three decades after his release from a Soviet prison. A Ukraine-born Soviet prisoner of conscience, Edelstein was imprisoned in 1984 on trumped-up drug charges because he was teaching Hebrew. He spent three years doing hard labor in Siberian camps. “Today, I stand...

(JTA) — City officials in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv published online security camera footage of vandals painting Nazi symbols on a Holocaust memorial in a bid to identify them. The municipality made the unusual move last week on its website, showing an image of an individual wearing a backpack and a hat squatting in front of a part of...